Creating employee advocacy: encouraging employees to engage with your social media programme

(Posted on 04/03/24)

If you are happy with your social media marketing programme, it may well be time to start considering how you can improve your strategy so you are increasing your engagement and reach as far as possible. Don’t forget that your employees have the potential to be the best possible advocates for your brand. Whether you have four employees or 40, or even 400, each can play a valuable role when it comes to promoting your organisation. 

If you want more engagement on social media, then firstly you need to find ways to encourage your employees to like and share and engage with your company social posts. Over time, this can evolve further so that they are proactively posting positive messages of their own about your brand on social media. This will enormously expand your reach beyond just your own network and these more personal messages will resonate very well with your audience too. There is no doubt that personalised content can be authentic and very engaging and, after all, people respond to other human beings much better than they do to brands.

 

Like and share to reap multiple benefits

If you encourage your employees to promote your brand, this will actually have an even greater positive commercial impact than merely spreading the word about what you are trying to promote. In order to persuade your staff to advocate on your behalf, you need to create a supportive environment in the first place. Fostering those surroundings will motivate your team, boost productivity and even improve loyalty. By building much higher levels of staff satisfaction, this will, in turn, lead to lower levels of absenteeism and better retention rates overall. The positive image of your workplace that is being projected to the outside world will also help attract the highest calibre of future recruits.

 

Support and provide social media training for employee advocates

Once you decide to encourage your employees to advocate on your behalf, you should develop a programme of incentives and recognition to encourage employees at every level to take part. As well as making it easy for them to do so, it is really important that you provide appropriate social media training. You need to create and share guidelines and draw up a code of best practices too. This is not only for consistency of tone and messaging but also to ensure that content is appropriate and ‘on message’ for your brand.

 

Get in touch to see how we can assist you with your social media marketing.